Track of the Week
Weeks 4-5: The History of Solfège
Do The First Three Notes “Just Happen” To Be...Do Re Mi?
Here in northern Vermont, where you can’t swing a ski pole or sap bucket without hitting a von Trapp or two, a “Sound of Music” Track of the Week was inevitable, and this song is the perfect fit for this week of class.
But, pace Rogers and Hammerstein, solfège syllables didn’t actually come from golden sundrops and long-distance running.
Let’s Start at the Very Beginning
Music, like language, has been around far longer than it’s been written down. Musical notation is more recent than written language, with the oldest example dating from 3400 years ago, over 2000 years after the earliest artifacts of written language.The earliest surviving notations, like the Hurrian hymn above, had to be decoded; they are not part of a living tradition. Modern Western notation really dates to the end of the first millenium of the Common Era, a little over one thousand years ago. Much of what it looks like comes from the work of an 11th-century Benedictine monk called Guido of Arezzo, who also invented the solfège system.
Above: one of the Hurrian Hymns, the oldest known notated music
Let’s see if I can make it easier
At that time, the music of the Western Church consisted entirely of unaccompanied single-line melodies. There were many hundreds of them, all passed on by oral tradition: by teachers singing to students. Brother Guido was frustrated by the amount of time and effort required to teach a single tune, and was looking for a shortcut.When you read you begin with A-B-C
Guido’s first innovation was to rationalize the notation of pitch. Early notation consisted of pen-strokes called “neumes” that were written above the liturgical text (lyrics). A neume indicated the melodic contour of the melody fragment for an individual syllable. This was helpful as a memory aid, but it was not definite enough to convey a melody to someone who didn’t already know it.By Guido’s time, neumes were often “heighted”: individual neumes were written higher or lower on the page to show their relative pitch. Eventually, people added a horizontal line to indicate the pitch C as a reference point, and later sometimes a second line to show the pitch F.
Above: “unheighted” neumes
But the notation was still approximate; it did not express exactly what pitch was to be sung at every moment.
Above: “heighted” neumes
Now, put it all together
Guido’s notational innovation was to add additional lines and space them at the interval of a third, so that each line or space in between would correspond to a specific pitch: this is the modern staff, give or take a line.
Above: neumes on 4-line staff
(This was the moment in music history when pitches or sounds became definitively identified with specific "notes", which has interesting implications for the way Western notated music developed compared to, say, European folk music or the music of Africa and India.)
When you sing you begin with do-re-mi...but it doesn’t mean anything, so we put in words.
Actually it did mean something. “Do Re Mi” are syllables derived from words of a pre-existing song, not the other way around, as in “The Sound of Music”. But the idea is the same: using a memorable tune to learn the patterns of musical scales.Guido’s eureka moment came when he realized that a certain hymn tune already existed in which each phrase begins on the next higher note of the scale, providing (as he put it) “a most excellent method for finding an unknown melody, recently given to us by God, and proven most useful.”
Or, in modern notation:
Here is the hymn, with score in several formats, courtesy of YouTube:
Once you have these notes in your heads you can sing a million different tunes by mixing them up
When you know the notes to sing You can sing most anything...says the fictionalized Maria von Trapp. In the genuine words of Guido:
You may competently sing unheard chants as soon as you see them written down, or, hearing unwritten chants, you can immediately set them down in writing well.
The fine print
“Ut” eventually was changed to “do” (abbreviation of Lat. “Dominus”, Lord) because it is easier to sing and begins on a consonant, like the other syllables.The missing seventh scale tone was added, originally labeled “si” (the Latin abbreviation for St. John, the dedicatee of Ut Queant Laxis), later changed to “ti” in the English-speaking world to make it more distinct from “so”.
What didn’t this Gui do?
Guido also added colors and clef signs to indicate the specific pitch of the staff lines, writing:If a clef or color is missing from the neumes, it will be like a well when it does not have a rope, whose waters, although many, are of no benefit to those seeing them.
He also advocated for a musical alphabet of 7 letters instead of 4:
I am astonished that some have made four symbols for the pitches, as if they are the same at the fifth, of which some differ.In other words, Guido is saying, while the interval pattern of a white-note tetrachord is sometimes the same as that of the tetrachord that begins 5 notes higher, this is not always so: for example, C-D-E-F has the same pattern of whole and half steps as G-A-B-C, but G-A-B-C does not have the same pattern as D-E-F-G.
The 7-letter system, by contrast, brings out the consistent pattern repetition that occurs at the eighth tone, thus making music notation so simple it is even [Guido again] “plain to little boys.”
(Guido is silent on the musical faculties of little girls.)